You Break It, You Fix It
by Artesian
Summary: There are a lot of rules in Tony's life, but only one real one, that he still believes ever since he learned it as a small child: If you broke it, you have to be the one who fixes it. Doesn't matter what it is: toys, machines, hearts, minds, souls. (Rated K, will probably go up in later chapters)
1. Chapter 1

" - mistaken, Mr. President," his father said, balancing the phone on his shoulder while he reached for a pen. He was tall, smelled of aftershave, starched shirts and alcohol on this hot summer day. As he played nearby his father's feet, his legs were the pillions of a great bridge around which the toy cars drove in a fantastic car chase, leaping over the obstacles in the roadway of collapsed bridges. One of the cars shot a ray gun occasionally to clear the way. Zap, zap, zap.

His father continued speaking on the phone, ignoring his son in favor of the tinny voice on the other side of the line. "A agency is needed to deal with strange events and unusual people, both our own and others. Superpowers exist," he declared, and his son sat up sharply, almost bumping his head on the underside of the desk. He loved hearing those stories. Maybe his father would tell one to the President? "- and to expect a traditional agency to cope with challenges of that kind is too much expect, sir. The bureaucratic environment is hostile to-" the boy lost interest as he lost track of most of the words in the sentence, but remained leaning against his father's legs just in case a story was forthcoming.

Soon the boy was running the toy car up and down his father's legs while he spoke, because why couldn't you make a car that could stick to cliffs and walls and bridges? You could. Maybe one day he would. His father was angry now. He was loud and kept repeating a word the boy didn't know. High-draw, high-draw. Whatever it was, his father didn't like it much. After a particularly sharp exclamation, his father pushed back his chair and leaned down to his son. "Tony, go play somewhere else. You're distracting me." The boy hesitated. "Go on. Shoo," his father said, like he was chasing an annoying cat away.

Tony left his father alone and sulked away to play in the other room, as he'd been ordered to do, but he was feeling petulant. He would rather have been with his mother, but she had gone off with a bunch of cackling ladies that smelled like rotten flowers. Or he could have been out riding his tricycle, but Jarvis wasn't here to make sure he didn't run into anything and he wasn't allowed outside without someone watching him. So he was stuck inside and his father wasn't even talking about anything interesting.

He sat in the library beside his father's study and stared up at the case of keepsakes his father had forbidden him to touch - not that it was necessary, as they were about five feet off the ground and Tony was just barely over two feet. There was a shelf full of mockups of airplane designs that his father had designed that was particularly tempting. Tony wondered if they could fly, if he threw them right.

A chair would take care of one two feet of height, and from there, Tony figured, he could climb up on the shelf below it and pull the closest airplane down. It would be easy. He abandoned his toy cars on the floor with a clatter and pushed the stool over to the shelves. It was tough for him, and he slipped and almost fell a couple of times, but he managed it, climbed up on it and, after leaning back slightly to take in the full length of how far he'd have to reach, he ran his small hands through his unruly brown hair and wrapped his fingers around the shelf and pulled himself up. Success, he was balanced well enough that he could reach out and snag the edge of the plane with his fingers -

Failure. The plane overbalanced and fell past him to the floor, and Tony, flailing to catch it before it hit, fell too, landing on the soft cushion of the chair with still enough force to make him cry out in pain. He heard his father swear and hang up the phone as he held back his tears, sniffing once or twice and glancing down at the plane on the floor. It wasn't a whole plane anymore. More, several parts of a plane.

Bad. Tony was going to be scolded. He'd done something bad, he knew it. The tears welled up again, this time from fear instead of pain, and hovered at the edge of his vision. "Oh no..." his father groaned, and leaned down to pick up the broken plane. "Tony, I told you not to touch those!"

"It was an accident," he mumbled.

His father sighed and placed the plane on a desk out of Tony's view. "You accidentally dragged a chair over to the shelf and accidentally climbed up and accidentally touched it and accidentally knocked it on the ground.."

There were tears leaking out of his eyes now. "... I didn't mean to break it!"

"Well, you did," he snapped back, and Tony started to sob. His father drew back slightly and ran his hand through his formerly immaculately slicked back hair. He opened his mouth, then closed it. "Uh. It's not... I know you didn't mean to." He hitched up his pants slightly and squatted down in front of the crying boy, crossing his arms in front of him. "Don't cry, Tony. Brave boys don't cry. They fess up to what they did, and make it better."

Tony continued sniffling and his father awkwardly held out his arms to the boy for a hug. He felt like stiff cloth and strong after-shave and discomfort, but he still felt like his father, and it was okay as long as his father was there. "Sorry, Dad," he whispered, when his tears finally stopped.

His father patted him on the back. "Feel better?" He leaned back and said briskly, "Now, here's the rule."

"Another rule?" There were a lot of rules. Don't touch the planes, don't take apart dad's fountain pens, brush your teeth before bed, wear shoes outside, don't talk to dad's friends unless they talk to you first. Tony remembered them all, but usually pretended he didn't.

A headshake. "This isn't just another rule. It's the most important rule of them all."

Tony listened attentively, sitting on the chair, for once at eye level with his father.

"You break it; you fix it," his father intoned. It sounded like it was carved in stone somewhere, and he was just reading it to his son. "Just fix what was broken, and everything will be fine." Tony nodded. He wasn't sure how to fix the plane, but he'd figure it out. He always figured things out. "I'll teach you how to fix the plane, and everything will be fine once it's fixed."

They did. That day, Tony learned about wood glue, toothpick struts, sandpaper, and how to use a fine paintbrush. The plane wasn't perfect by the time they were done, but his father was satisfied with it, and proclaimed it fixed. Then they had dinner, and his father talked on the phone for a while, and then his mother came home, and after that, with his father smiling and his mother smiling, and they were both smiling at him, Tony decided his father was right. It was a good rule. You break it, you fix it. And everything will be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

A month later, Tony learned about using vinegar on rust-stains, soap on mudstains, and salt on bloodstains. A few weeks after that, he learned how to duct-tape a basketball back together. Two months later, it was his third birthday, and his father taught him how to straighten out a fork with pliers. On his fourth birthday, he learned how to replace a tire on his bicycle. On his fifth, he learned how to restore a lawn mower back to its original condition (it was faster after he fixed it, even if the gardener claimed it was possessed by demons now). On his sixth, his father spent almost a whole day walking him through how to remove the dent he'd placed in the side of one of the cars and refinish the paint from the bramble scratches. He was sorry about that.

He didn't borrow a car again until almost a month later, and he managed to return it to the garage without a scratch. He was very proud of that, but his father didn't see it that way when the grumpy rich old lady that lived next door visited and complained about her side-swiped mailbox, even though Tony had fixed it as good as new without even bothering anyone about it.

"Your son is completely out of control, Mr. Stark," she'd snapped, and Tony felt once more that the 'don't speak unless spoken to by adults' rule was completely unfair because even though he was carefully not calling her an old hag, he was getting no credit for it. Granted, he was currently in the patch of cleaned out crawlspace and directly beneath her feet, so he'd have gotten yelled at for that anyway. "How do you expect to raise a gentleman like this, in your degenerate mess of a household?"

He heard the sound of his father lighting a cigar, and then his voice. "I don't expect to raise a gentleman. I expect to raise a man." Tony felt the floorboards bend slightly against his fingertips as his father stood up. "Mrs. Van Hoyt, mind your own damn business. Haven't you got some grandchildren to bother?"

"Well, I never," van Hoyt gasped, and stomped away.

That night, his father laid out more new rules. Rule 27: No going in the garage, period. Rule 18b: Do not (and I really mean it this time, son) go outside the house without Jarvis or one of the security people. Rule 29: If Jarvis, the security people, or his mother called him, he had to come. Rule 30: He was not to be alone outside of the house, understood? Rule 17 reiterated: And no driving the car. He had his bicycle if he wanted to enjoy himself.

It was stifling. There were people around all the time. Even in the secluded hallways, there were serious people with eagles on their shoulders. Most of them wouldn't talk to him. (Rule 31: Don't bother the security people.) There were people everywhere, and everyone was too worried and stern and busy to talk with him.

His mother's cat accidentally shredded a curtain when Tony was playing with her, and no one would teach him how to sew the gauzy material back together properly, so he spent almost a whole day in his room trying to make tiny stitches so it wouldn't unravel more, but it looked like Frankenstein when he hung it back up and the worst part was no one noticed how he'd just sat in his room all day, and then no one noticed that he'd fixed the curtain, or even that he'd broken it in the first place.

He hadn't seen his mother in over a month. She was in Italy and hadn't written to him, and he didn't know why. Was she mad at him for driving the car? Did she not want to come home because of all the busy worried nervous people? Was it because Dad kept yelling at the phone, and Aunt Peggy was visiting a lot but couldn't say more than a couple words to him although she did still pick him up and fly him through the air if she had a spare moment. He loved flying like that.

Then they took his electronics tutor away, an old German guy who answered all of Tony's questions and didn't treat him like an unnervingly clever gremlin like the others all did. Tony had screamed at that but it didn't do any good. Even Peggy wouldn't take his side. She just agreed with Howard that Dr. Mendel wasn't a good teacher for Tony. No one would tell him why because he was an amazing teacher and why was everyone being so stupid?

He ran away that Tuesday.

* * *

><p>"Tony."<p>

He wouldn't look at his father's face.

"Tony, look at me."

He looked up. His father looked upset and angry and maybe a little frightened, which wasn't a look Tony immediately recognized on his father's face. He'd seen it on Jarvis' face, and on Mother's, but not on his father. He bit his lip, and glanced away again. His father put a hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

Tony sniffed, twitching his chin up slightly, wrinkling his nose and lips to get the tears to go away. "I'm fine."

"What you did was not acceptable. It was dangerous and could have gotten you killed."

He didn't understand. He was good at driving. He was big for his age and he could step on the pedals and see the road at the same time. He brought his spring-loaded walnut shooter, and that could knock a man out at ten paces. He'd done it before. He had plenty of money, plenty of food, and he'd even brought lots of warm clothes because he knew his mother would want him to bundle up. (Rule 10: Stay bundled up when it's cold).

The only thing that had scared him was that guy in the parking lot he'd sat in to eat his burger for lunch. He'd come right up to Tony and said, "Hey, you're little Tony Stark, aren't you? We've been looking all over for you." And Tony had reached out and locked all the doors, then started the car and drove away from the guy.

Even that wasn't as scary as when the police pulled him over and made him go back home. He didn't want to go back home where his father was yelling at people all the time and he had to sneak past the security guys to go anywhere interesting and he wasn't even allowed in the garage any more.

"You don't want to stay here any more, do you?" Howard said softly, and Tony looked up and shook his head.

"Can we go back to Maine? Where we went fishing last year? Or we could go stay with mom in Italy, she'd want us to come, can we please?"

His father shook his head slowly. "No."

"Why not?" he whined. "We went somewhere last year."

"Times have changed. It wouldn't be a good idea."

"WHY?" Tony yelled.

"Because it's not safe, you god damn brat!" Howard yelled back. "You're out of control and we can't keep you safe if you insist in being such a wild little -" He drew in a breath and sat back. Tony had his arms folded and was glaring right back at him, not crying even a little, and as soon as his father stopped talking, Tony started.

"It's not fair keeping me trapped like this. I'm so bored, Dad! There's no one to talk to and nothing to do since you took away Mr. Mendel and I WANT -" He broke off and stood up to storm off to his room -

- but his father grabbed his arm -

- and he was holding it so tight -

- it _hurt _-

"OW!" he yelled, but Howard just dragged him back to his seat and snapped at Tony to sit down and be quiet because this was important.

"You're going to boarding school."

"NO!"

"You're leaving in the morning. It's part way through the term, but I'm sure you'll make friends."

"NO!"

"Tony, this is the best -"

"NO!" he screamed. "NO, NO, NO!"

"Jarvis, take Tony to his room," Howard ordered, his voice hoarse.

He'd cried for a while, and stared at the red spots where his father had held his wrist too tightly. There was bruises starting in little rings like bracelets. He rubbed a finger across them and winced. Broken skin. He didn't know how to fix it.

He flopped back on his bed and drummed his feet on the mattress, but it didn't make him feel any better. He wrinkled his nose to make the tears go away, and stared at the ceiling. He would creep downstairs to find his father and ask him to let him stay. He knew he could be good. They could get more tutors, and he could ask Jarvis to take him to the park every day and he wouldn't get too bored that way. Maybe he could make friends with some of the other boys in the city, if the security people said he could.

Tony hopped off the bed and went to the door, then stopped and leaned against it, his head bumping the door. He didn't know how to fix this. His father wouldn't _listen _to him. He _never_ listened to him. He didn't pay attention to him until he'd done something wrong...

He whirled around and kicked at his desk. The pencil cup on top wobbled, and he kicked again and again and again, until it crashed to the ground and broke into smithereens. He fell to his knees and gathered them up, piece by piece in his hands. There was a lot of powder, but he thought that it could be glued back together okay. He went to the wardrobe and dumped the lot into one of his handkerchiefs, and carefully opened the door to his room, glancing right and left for security people.

No one there.

He crept down the stairs and up behind his father while he was talking on the phone. "Peggy, I don't want to send him there, but Hydra has forced my hand. I can't keep him here. ... I know. ... Well, he'll understand someday. Yeah. I'll tell him. Watch your back, Pegs."

Howard turned around. "Tony?"

Tony held up the handkerchief full of shards. "I broke it," he explained quietly. "Can we fix it?"

His father stood over him. Too tall and too far away. He didn't smell like cologne. It had been a long day, and now his father just smelled like too much gin and sweat and tiredness. He didn't kneel down and inspect the shards. He just looked at the bruises speckling Tony's arm and drew back slightly. "I can't fix it. I've got... important things to do, Tony."

"This is important," the little boy insisted.

He could hear the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the front room and see his father swallow, his adam's apple bobbing up and down. "I know," Howard said finally. "Go to bed, Tony. Get some rest."

"I don't wanna go," Tony said, still holding the pencil cup shards out in front of him.

Howard nodded. "I know."

His son wrinkled his nose and upper lip and sniffed. "Captain America wouldn't send me away. I'd promise to be good, and he'd let me stay even if it was hard. He wouldn't just, just _leave_ people he cared about."

His father sighed and knelt down, not touching him, even when Tony shuffled forward a step for a hug. "Steve would have. If it was the right thing to do. I'm sorry."

Tony sniffed again, then shook his head, out of words. He stared down at the shards of the pencil cup, then turned and wordlessly plodded away from his father, up the stairs, to his bed and cried for many long minutes before he finally fell asleep, still in the clothes he'd run away from home in, still holding a handkerchief wrapped around the shards of a broken pencil cup no one had the time to fix.

* * *

><p>More to come, but a time skip is likely. (Also preoccupied with an AU, so it may be a while).<p> 


End file.
